2y ago

The U.K. Government Is Very Close To Eroding Encryption Worldwide

www.eff.org The U.K. Government Is Very Close To Eroding Encryption Worldwide

The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force...

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Outrageous. I would actually be protesting if this were to happen in my country, and you wouldn't hear the end of it. Protect-the-children my ass, this is an attack on the freedom of the common folk. Criminals will continue to use encryption even if its against the law; they were already commiting crimes, so what's one more in the list?

How is a country going to end encryption worldwide? The West okay, bu what jurisdiction do they have over me?
- That's what I also fail to grasp.
  If things get serious and for example the WhatsApp, Telegram and Signals of the world have to disable e2ee to keep operating in the UK, I guess they could just leave that market before compromising data privacy of their users worldwide.
  I don't see this "ending encryption worldwide" thingy happening, at all.
  But they could dig themselves a deeper hole after Brexit, that's definitely possible and wouldn't surprise me a bit.
  
  Or ship specific versions of their software for the UK, as it is done with other software in other countries with restrictions.
- Not even the West. Just the UK.
- Just make a list how many companies tech companies operate from west. All those companies have to follow the law of the homeland.
  
  Sure, but most of those companies didn't even care much about privacy any way. How would this affect Matrix for example?
- Idk where you live, but much of the world already lacks privacy
  
  What you said means pretty much nothing if you don't take the time to explain it.

This bill seems to be all sort of bad (maybe with some good intentions), really hope it doesn't pass to not give other countries any ideas
- Please don't fall in that trap. Authoritarian attacks on citizens have always been neatly wrapped in either anti-terrorism or protect-the-children propaganda since the dawn of politics. This is a very obvious and delibirate attempt to further remove freedom from the common folk.

It’s not really that hard to deploy a matrix server. So this bill is dumb as anyone who wants encrypted messages can easily have them.
- I'm all for Matrix, but the things is, Matrix is primarily developed by people in the UK. They will be easily forced to implement backdoors.
  
  That’s good to know🙏
  Hopefully some trustworthy third party can audit the code if this ever becomes a thing.

UK is such a shithole.

Would VPN protect an individual against such actions?
- VPN will encrypt your communications between your local PC/phone/device and the VPN server you connect to. After that, the data packet transits just as if you’re anywhere else. So if they can crack that encryption, your data is still open. They might not know where the packet came from, but if you are talking PII, that’s not really important. (Does it really matter what IP you had when you tell them your health history and name? Or full banking info?)
  
  I really don't like that.
  Even if it will get dismissed/amended so it doesn't ruin open and private internet, the direction it's all going really worries me. Every couple of months/years you will hear that the governments are trying again and again...Eventually they will succeed - enter "1984"
  
  What about decentralised solutions like Matrix? I think they would have hard time accessing anything if it's stored on a private server. EDIT: Or is it on ISP level? So no matter how you access/communicate - it will all be scanned the point when data leaves your device and communicates with web.
  
  Why would they get a VPN to exit from the UK tho lol

30 comments